


Mind's Eye

by likethedirection



Series: Unfrayed [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF!Missouri, Feelings, Gen, Psychic Narrator, Sam Needs A Hug, Sam and Dogs, Season/Series 08, Weechester Flashbacks, so many feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 00:23:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6063736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethedirection/pseuds/likethedirection
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a parking lot somewhere, Sam Winchester is dialing her number.  (Or: Sam takes a detour on his way to Sioux Falls.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mind's Eye

**Author's Note:**

> I just really love Missouri Moseley, you guys.

In a parking lot somewhere, Sam Winchester was dialing her number.  In his passenger seat was some sweet soul, an innocent thing, its thoughts too simple and abstract to belong to any kind of human.  At the very surface of Sam’s intent was a request, backed by not a little desperation.  

With a huff of effort, she pushed to her feet, took off her gloves, and headed inside with a muttered, “Oh, Lord.”

She didn’t rush to the phone, because goodness knew that boy could hesitate his way to his grave and back.  On the way, she mentally catalogued the state of her guest room, and then the backyard.  Well, if there was going to be a fit young man in the house anyhow, he could put up the garden fence himself.

She picked up the phone just as it started to ring.  “Sam Winchester, what did I tell you and your brother the last time you were here?”

A stunned pause, and then remembering and pulling himself together.  “Missouri?”

“Well, who do you think?”  She shook her head.  “What I told you was not to be strangers.  And then all I hear from you are shockwaves from every metaphysical disaster in all but a decade, and you couldn’t be bothered to make one phone call?”

Gaping, hesitating, and then that puppy-dog shame he’d been so good at since the night she’d rocked him to sleep while his father fell apart in her living room a floor below.  “Yeah.  Yeah, we’ve been...kind of terrible.  I’m sorr--”

“Apologize by putting a fence around my vegetable garden when you get here,” she said.  “The guest room’s ready for you, and it’s yours for as long as you need, but you keep those shelves wiped and clean your own sheets.  Too much dust floating around in the air makes my asthma act up.  And I’m making pork chops tonight, so don’t you go spoiling it with any of that garbage they sell at the gas station.  Are we clear?”

She gave him a second to catch up, gather himself, and slump with relief, blinking his eyes dry.  “Yeah.  Yes, uh, ma’am.”

“You’re going to be all right,” she said, because someone needed to remind that poor boy of these things when his brother wasn’t around to do it.  “We’ll talk through what you just did when you get here.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly, sincerely, reminding her that he and Dean had always been sweet things at heart, even when their daddy had tried to wring it out of them.  “Oh, um.  There’s one other thing.  I don’t know how you feel about--”

“Oh, you can bring your friend,” she assured him.  “As long as she understands she’ll be sleeping on the floor.  I don’t allow dogs on my furniture.  That’s non-negotiable.”

Sam exhaled a rush of a laugh, relief washing through.  “Yeah.  Yeah, that’s fine.  That’s great.”  A happy spark from the little soul next to him, and the thump of a wagging tail.  “She won’t be any trouble.”

“Oh, I know she won’t.”  Missouri glanced at the clock.  “I need to finish up in the garden before getting started on dinner.  Oh, and you watch that right front wheel, baby.  It’s overfilled.”

When that boy beamed at no one a hundred miles away, she could feel it like the sun.  “I will.  Thank you, Missouri.  Just...thank you.”

“I’ll see you at six thirty.  Sharp.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

-

On December 17th, 1983, John Winchester knocked on her door with a story to tell.  That same day, she met two sweet little things that the man didn't have a clue what to do with.  A floppy-haired boy with a nightmare behind his eyes and a mouth shut tight, and a squirming little snowdrop of a thing with wide-set eyes and kindness already swimming through his soul.

She'd always made sure the energies of her home would be particularly welcoming and comforting to children, because if there was a child in her house, there was a good chance that child needed it more than anyone.  It was a beautiful thing, watching the weight lift from those boys when they came through her door.

Within the hour, Dean was bounding from bookshelf to fireplace to cupboard with an enthusiastic refrain of, _What's this?  What's that do?  Who's in this picture?  Do you have a wizard hat like Mickey?_ and only holding still long enough for a few words of an answer before he was sprinting to the next curiosity.  She patiently answered his questions while Sam babbled to himself in her lap, turning one of her coasters over and over in his hands, unwilling to look at any of the toys his daddy tried to give him until he'd studied and tasted every inch.  Every now and then Dean would leap onto the sofa next to her to look at Sam's coaster and remind him not to eat it, then give his baby brother a big kiss on the head that made Sam gurgle a laugh before going back to his game.

Their daddy watched them, awestruck, all the while.

The only other day she saw the boys was the day after she and John had walked through the burnt husk of his old house, and the hulking, malevolent presence lingering in the charred walls had nearly choked her senses to death.  John had left with barely a thank-you, too shaken up by the experience for much else.  The next day, he'd come back with Dean and Sam.

 _They're all right when they're here,_ he’d said, on the edge of pleading.  She'd reminded him she was no nanny, but Dean had seemed content enough to sit with Sam in his lap and flip slowly through a picture book - one of the few they'd been able to save from the fire, John said - while she talked with John about the presence in the house, more effectively now that they had both pulled themselves together.

It went downhill when there was a little tearing sound, and then Dean was shrilling Sam's name and wrenching the book away, disturbing Sam into wailing while John demanded to know what that was about.

 _He ripped it!_ Dean had shouted, holding up the book, one page torn deep across the corner.  John glanced at it, but was mostly busy picking up Sam to quiet him down, and Dean pushed the book into his face before he straightened.   _Look!_

 _It's just a book, Dean,_ John said, distracted, and Missouri closed her eyes, because somehow she knew at least one of those boys would learn empathy from their father, bless their poor souls.

 _It is not!_ Dean shouted back.   _It's Mom's, and it's the one where she does the voices, and he ripped it!  I hate him!_

_Dean!_

At which point she had intervened, instructing John to just look after his baby and leading a sniffling Dean upstairs.  She asked what his mama had done when a page was torn, even though she was already seeing it in the back of her mind.  He told her, and she asked if he wanted to try it himself this time.  She rubbed his back and held the torn pieces together while he wiped his face and painstakingly placed a Band-Aid over the ripped corner.  First one side, then the other.

This child would spend his life trying to fix broken things, she knew, as he traced his fingers over the Band-Aid and then sank into her side and clung until he sniffled himself to sleep.  There was purpose running all through him, and devotion, and the most fragile hope she'd ever seen.

She’d put him in the guest bed and gone back down to where John was not doing so well with his baby.

He was holding on by a thread when she got there, and she just sighed and took a red-faced, howling Sam into her arms.   _Do what you need to,_ she told John as she took Sam upstairs.  She didn't stay to watch John crumble.

She sat in the rocking chair in her bedroom and swayed with the baby, humming and shaking her head at the power this little thing would have, his destiny already coursing through his bloodstream.  Waiting in him was a will of iron and a curious sponge of a mind, and sacrifice.

They were, both of these boys, so much bigger than the bodies that housed them.

Sam drifted to sleep, and she set him in the guest bed next to his brother.  As she left, there was a shift on the bed, and a shift in the boys' energy.  A warming, and a joining.

 _I don’t hate you, Sammy,_ Dean whispered, curling around him like the sweetheart he was, though she was well enough down the stairs that her mind was the only one to see it.

She’d warned John, that night, that his children needed more from him than his protection.  What she had seen inside those children, she kept to herself.

-

"It's unlocked," she called as Sam raised his hand to knock.

A beat, and the door creaked open.  There was a hiss of, "Riot--Riot, stay.  Stay--no--" before there was a bounding click of paws and a furry body pressing against her leg, panting hopefully at the greens she was stirring.

"Oh, no, sweetheart," she said to the dog without looking up.  "That's not how this works."

Sam thumped in after the dog, and this time Missouri did look up, in time to catch his wince.  "Riot--ah."  He gave the dog a stern look and patted his thigh, and she trotted reluctantly back to his side and sat down.  He patted her head and looked sheepishly back up.  "Sorry."

"She didn't hurt anything," Missouri said, spooning the greens into a bowl and setting it aside before crossing the kitchen.  "Now hold still and let me look at you."

He obeyed, if a bit uncertainly, and she put her hands on her hips and took him in.  Six feet and change of that child she'd held, his energy suffused with sacrifice, with uncertainty and with old grief.  New grief, too, fresh as blood.  The strong will still gleamed in him, and the curiosity still lit his eyes, and that was good.  There was a hollow in the energy at his side, a space reserved for someone.  Whoever it was, they weren't here.

And inside him, traces.  Scars.  Claw-marks on the inside, malicious and misunderstood.  Marks from a piece of him that had been scooped out, broken into shards, and forced back in.  It was still re-learning to fit in its own shape.  It fit awkwardly now, the way he fit awkwardly in her kitchen, lost as he'd ever been, with his hair in his eyes and nothing but threadbare socks on his feet.

She eyed those last, and lifted her eyes.  "You have a good memory."

He looked at his feet for a clue what to say, and she shook her head.  "Sam Winchester, you are a grown man who has fought the Devil and come out the other side.  You've got no business with the floor.  Now go wash up, it's almost ready.  You can unpack once you're fed."

Relief glimmered in him, dimly, at being told what he was supposed to do.

After his initial gush of appreciation for the meal, Sam spent dinner being quietly overwhelmed, and she left him to it, content enough to monologue on light topics like how the peppers and tomatoes were coming up particularly nicely this year, and how the nice couple down the street just brought home triplets, Heaven help them, last week.  Sam nodded and hummed at appropriate moments, even stuck as he was in his own head.  He was a good boy.  Said 'please' and 'thank you,' kept his elbows off the table, and obediently banished Riot to the kitchen with a bowl of some dog food he'd brought along.  If his mind kept circling back to _What am I doing here_ , he respectfully kept it to himself.

He didn't need to be told to help clean up after they were done, and with that finished, she ushered him into the living room.  Riot happily reunited with him there, but whimpered in confusion when he held her back from jumping on the sofa with him.  Ultimately Sam sighed and parked himself on the floor, his back against the sofa, so she could drape herself over his lap like a dog half her size.

When he looked up at her, Missouri nodded to him.  “Go ahead.”

“Um,” he began.  “How much do you know?”

“Tell me the parts that count,” she said.  “I can fill in the blanks.”

Sam looked into middle distance, and she could feel him rewinding the years, sifting through experiences without focusing too long on any one, like a radio dial stuck spinning.

“Well,” he said once he’d found a memory to linger on, “I guess the best place to start is the first time I died.”

-

The third time she saw John Winchester’s boys, they weren’t boys anymore.  When she found them waiting in her hallway, she had to look up to see their eyes.  They were young men, mistrustful as their father, rough around the edges.  Dean was a young John except for all the ways that he wasn’t, buried underneath his expectations for himself, stacked high enough to hide behind.  But when he looked at Sam, there was love.  A strange whirlwind of brotherly protectiveness and parental devotion and resentment for much more now than a torn page in a book, but it was love, so he was allowed in her door.

Sam was hard to read then, growing in all different directions, committing to none in particular.  He was grieving then, too, in a quiet, all-encompassing way.  He didn’t plan to leave his brother alone, but he also didn’t plan to stay.  All through their conversation he silently struggled to find meaning in this place, in this situation, in his own experience, in just about everything.

She lectured and teased Dean, because he was less fragile just then, and because someone had to question that mask he was wearing, if he wouldn’t.  She was gentle with Sam, because he was discovering they had something in common.

They took care of the presence in their old house.  They said goodbye to their mother all over again.  After talking to Sam, Missouri found Dean up in the little girl’s empty room, the energy in that space still bearing his tiny fingerprints.  He was looking out the window, steeped in memory.

His mind was quiet but for one mantra that neither she nor he seemed to know how to silence: _Everyone leaves, everyone leaves, everyone leaves._

-

Sam told his story, and Missouri’s senses flared to attention, because behind it was another story.  One that had almost, almost been.

He was sitting in her living room now, but a phantom of him was sitting in front of a television set with his brother, resigned and chained by loyalty.  He spoke of the conversation he’d had with his Amelia, but her shadow was opening a door to an empty motel room that was breaking her heart.

There was a path, somewhere, that would lead him to disaster, born of the quiet heroism he’d always been capable of.  But the path he was taking now, that had led him to her door, was not that same path.  

She couldn’t see what came next for Sam Winchester.

He went quiet after he was done, lowering his eyes to the dog curled up on his legs and stroking her head like it was therapy.  He was waiting.  It took a moment for Missouri to narrow down that, at this particular moment, he was waiting for her.

She asked the only question he hadn’t already answered.  “Why come here?  After all that?”

Maybe it was therapy after all, him and that dog.  It seemed to help him, being with a creature who thumped its tail every time he made eye contact.  He smiled wanly at Riot and scratched behind her ears.  “I’m technically on my way to Sioux Falls,” he said.  “We have a,” _a friend,_ his pause said, “a place there.  Our friend owned it, when he was around.  There’s a lot of information there, and a lot of hunters who could use it.  As far as I know, it’s just been gathering dust.  I thought maybe…”  He pressed his lips together, something she’d watched him do as a baby when he hadn’t been sure how he felt.  “I don’t know.”

“You thought maybe you and your brother could part ways for a while,” she finished for him, and his eyes flew up, conflicted and pleading.

“Is that wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head.  “I could feel you tearing yourself in two over that question since you crossed the Oklahoma border, and you’re going to keep tearing yourself in two over it no matter what I say.  I can’t tell you what will make you happy, or your brother, or God.  All I can tell you is what you already know.”

He sank a little, digging his fingers into Riot’s fur.  She made a pleased snuffle and opened up, rolling onto her back, and he absently rubbed her belly.  “I think your opinion is probably worth more than mine.   _I_ don’t even know what I know.  Lately, it feels like I don’t know much of anything.”

“You know more than you think,” Missouri said, catching his eye.  “You know that you missed your brother when he was gone, but you moved on the best you could.  You know your heart’s hurting for your Amelia, the same way it hurt for Jessica.  You know that solitude has always felt like freedom to you, just like it’s always felt like rejection to your brother.  And you know you both deserve a lot better than you’ve gotten.”

Sam searched her eyes.  “Do you think I should go back?”

“Do you?”

His hand slowed to a stop while he played tug-o-war with his own mind, and the dog rolled onto her side and settled.  He swallowed hard.  “I mean.  I know I hurt him.  That’s what we’re good at,” he said with a huff, a bit wry but mostly sad.  “But I think...I think I need to try this, because I’ve never done it before.  When I was on my own, back in college, I was pretending.  I wasn’t being myself - not my whole self, anyway.  And after that, whenever I’ve been hunting on my own, it’s either been because I thought I’d lost Dean forever, or because I was...wrong.”  

A shadow drifted over his face like a cloud, and there were too many layers to that regret for her to sort out, but she could see the source of it, gleaming through his patchwork soul.

He shook his head.  “I’ve never done this on my own, as _me_ , fully human, not...not broken.  Knowing that Dean is here and okay.  Mostly okay.  And I guess it’s not like he’s alone.”

“The vampire,” Missouri clarified, and Sam nodded.

“I’m not happy about it,” he said.  “Yeah, Dean’s an adult, and he’s a good hunter.  If Benny turned on him, he’d have the skills to take care of it.”

Missouri read the uncertainty weaving through his words.  “But you still think he’s in danger.”

Sam smiled grimly.  “It’s like you said.  He doesn’t like being left alone.  A vampire is no problem for him, but if it’s someone he’s attached to?  Someone he trusted, betraying him?”  Guilt, again, but just like his brother, just like his father, he let that stubborn self-righteousness drown it out.  “He doesn’t handle it.  Losing people.  He hits rock bottom, every single time, and it takes so much for him to climb back out.  And that’s _with_ me there to pull him.  If he’s alone when that happens...I don’t know.”

“You sound awfully sure about that.”  He looked up and blinked at her, and she lifted her eyebrows.  “It sounds to me like you don’t trust his judgement.”

“Right now?  No, not really.”

“But you want him to trust yours.”

Sam paused, an argument on the tip of his tongue, then slowly let out his breath, resigned.  “Yeah.  Pretty much.  Because I guess being a great big hypocrite is the Winchester way.”

“Sometimes,” Missouri agreed evenly, and he huffed out another self-deprecating laugh, petting his dog like it was the only thing keeping him from falling to pieces.  “Sometimes not.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Sam said.  “I feel like there are these two paths, and no matter which one I take, someone gets hurt.  And there’s nothing I can do.  I know it’s not your job to tell me what’s right,” he added, his eyes flicking back up, “but frankly….I kind of wish someone would.”

She watched him for a long beat, tuning in to the uneasy shifting of his spirit, like a restless child tossing and turning in bed.

“This much I can tell you,” she said.  “There are never only two paths.”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

“I wasn’t finished,” Missouri said, and he clamped his mouth shut while she stood, crossing the room to her herb drawer.  “Sometimes,” she continued, “the right choice for a given moment is not to make a choice at all.  Sometimes, it’s just giving yourself the space to hear your own soul.”  

After rummaging for a second, she pulled out what she was looking for and pulled out a few sprigs, then turned back around.  “I can’t tell you what to do with your life, Sam.  But if you want my advice for right now, it’s this.”

She supported herself on his shoulder as she knelt next to him, and she left her hand there, meeting his eyes.

“You love up that dog,” she said, and his eyebrows twitched up.  “You drink down this tea I’m going to put on, and you take your time with it, don’t just throw it down the hatch.  You take your things to the guest room and get yourself set up.  You put these,” she held out the herbs, and he opened his hand to take them, “under your pillow.  They’re good for sleep, and for clarity of mind.  You sleep as long as you need to in that bed, and think about how you and your brother slept there one night before you were crawling.  Think about how that bed was where he forgave you for not understanding what he needed, and not needing the same thing yourself.  And tomorrow, you roll up those sleeves and help me put up a fence.”

He closed his hand around the herbs and slowly nodded, managing a shaky smile.  “I can do that.”

“I know you can,” she said, gentler now, because his eyes wanted to be wetter than they were.  “Now come here.”

She pulled him into the hug he needed, and he paused uncertainly for only a moment before sinking into it, his long arms winding around her back.  “You’ll be all right,” she told him again, and he took in an unsteady breath, nodding a little bit.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, holding on tight and not letting go until she did.  He stood with her to help her to her feet while the dog watched them with one eye.  “Um.  There’s one other thing I think I should do.”  He looked around the room, eyeing the charms hanging from the ceiling and the sigils carved into the doorways.  “How do you feel about devil’s-traps?”

Missouri sighed, but it wasn’t as though she hadn’t felt black eyes searching the world for Sam Winchester.  “Do what needs to be done.  But if you spoil my hardwood or my carpet, you’re going to have a lot more problems than a demon or two.  Is that clear?”  
  
Sam smiled so brightly that the dog’s tail went thumping.  “Yes, ma’am.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This will...probably stay a oneshot. Probably. Maybe? Probably. (Regardless, we'll be back.)


End file.
